Technical Support Blog

February 7, 2013

Port Forwarding on Netopia

It's easy to set up Virtual TimeClock at multiple office locations or even connect to your time clock from home or when you're on the road. As long as you've got an Internet connection, no problem. We've got instructions for using Virtual TimeClock over the Internet in our Remote Connectivity Guide. We've had some customers who use a Motorola Netopia DSL modem have some trouble setting up remote time clocks. The trouble stems from differences in terminology and a restriction of the Netopia.

First of all, the Netopia doesn't use the common description of 'port forwarding' or 'port mapping' to describe the process of opening up the network communication port that the time clock server needs to communicate with other time clocks over the Internet. The Netopia calls it a 'pinhole'.

Secondly, the Netopia has a limit on the external port number so you won't be able to use the default port of 56777. We've had success setting the external port to 48999. You should still be able to keep the internal port at 56777 to match the default TCP port of your time clock server.